As a teenage virtuoso pianist from Odessa, Gilels was thrust forward as a propaganda torchbearer for Soviet ideals. A hundred years after the great musician’s birth, though, many believe the association wasn’t so straightforward

‘He played like a man on a mission’ – albeit one he might not have agreed with … Emil Gilels in 1967.
Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Take care if you refer to Emil Gilels, whose centenary falls this week, as a “Soviet” pianist. How dare you, a fellow pianophile will say, pointing out that Gilels’s authoritative and inspired readings of Beethoven, Brahms and Prokofiev, immortalised on the most prestigious western recording labels, represent the acme of Russian spirit and European culture and that tainting him by association with Stalin’s murderous regime is the ultimate injustice.

“Soviet” is a dirty word for what remains of Russian intelligentsia for a very good reason. Gilels is undoubtedly a timeless genius, but few artists are as inextricably and fascinatingly entwined with political history as the pianist of whom Stalin said in the late 1930s that “Hitler has his Goebbels, I have my Gilels.”

For Stalin, musical performance was a weapon in the cultural battle with the west and opium of the people domestically

It was an era when pianism was a matter of life and death. While Lenin had proclaimed the most important of arts to be cinema, for Stalin it was musical performance, a universally intelligible art form to which one could easily affix the ideological meaning of choice, making it the ideal weapon in a cultural battle waged against the capitalist west (and an opium of the people domestically). A conveyor belt of music schools and conservatories finding and honing talented instrumentalists was thus created.

Its proponents were exceptionally successful when they ventured abroad, either to participate in international competitions – which they were expressly ordered to win, and routinely obliged – or to concertise, with Gilels spearheading the charge. The goal was to establish beyond doubt the cultural superiority of the Soviet way, especially since competing with the US economically proved more daunting.

The boy wonder from the Ukrainian culture hub of Odessa first attracted Stalin’s attention as a 16-year-old virtuoso who against all odds won first place in the first all-Soviet Union piano competition in 1933, a contest that had been expected to be decided between the best students of a few elite Moscow professors. Stalin referred to the flame-haired Gilels (whose Jewish first name Shmuel was swapped for the neutral Emil) as “the ginger devil”, with a mixture of admiration and sly antisemitism.

The athletic character of Gilels’s pianism in those early years, his lack of romantic affectation typical of the previous generation of performers from Cortot to Sofronitsky, lent itself to be conceptualised as representative of the new Soviet art, with its kernel value of muscular realism and rejection of bourgeois individualism. This invited ridicule from such old-school aesthetes as his one-time friend and great rival Sviatoslav Richter, and Heinrich Neuhaus, who taught him at the Moscow Conservatory. Neuhaus found his pupil somewhat provincial and in his appraisal rarely went beyond marvelling at Gilels’s technique and piano tone which, in a curious echo of Stalin, he described as being “as golden as his mop of hair”.

Gilels’s role as the torchbearer of Soviet ideals was most starkly in evidence in a surreal 1944 propaganda clip in which he’s seen playing a Rachmaninov prelude to Red Army soldiers to remind them of the “eternal values that are worth fighting for” with aircraft flying over his head.

Brought along to play at the Potsdam conference the following year, Gilels later recounted a tense episode when an impatient Stalin pressed him to identify a Chopin piece from his muddled description and play it to the assembled world leaders (it was the Polonaise “Militaire” op 40 No 1). In 1955 he became the first Soviet artist to tour the US since the 1920s, garnering rave reviews and even a citation in a Marianne Moore poem.

Gilels was too taciturn for us to track in any detail his transition from an enthusiastic Komsomol member to a man showing poorly concealed contempt for the party in his later years; it’s unclear what he made of being cast as a poster boy for a regime whose ugly sides were, by the 1950s, beginning to come to light. Yet he played like a man on a mission, which included showcasing Soviet composers such as Prokofiev (whose 8th piano sonata he premiered in 1944) and Shostakovich.

The signature recording from that US tour is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Fritz Reiner: “Dazzling in stratospheric Russian pianism, it’s an untrammelled powerhouse performance of visceral theatre, leonine attack and flying fingers,” Ates Orga recently wrote in BBC Music Magazine.

As Kiril Tomoff points out in Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition During the Early Cold War, 1945-1958, Stalin’s propaganda method had distinctly limited effect. Jean-Paul Sartre said of a chamber recital by Gilels and violinist Leonid Kogan that the audience applauded “not merely great virtuosi but Soviet culture”; yet most saw it as strictly the former. Above all, the appeal of classical music was always too limited to have any hope of converting Parisians or midwesterners into full-on communism through some crystalline Scarlatti and radiant Rachmaninov. Simply put, it was no match for Hollywood films, or the Beatles.

There are many accounts of Gilels being humiliated by the intrusive KGB agents who accompanied him on tours abroad

Following his first forays into the west as a flagbearer, Gilels found it hard to brush off the association with Soviet officialdom even as his style was maturing toward the richly inclusive intellectual lyricism he’s synonymous with today. It is clear the regime’s paranoia was making his life miserable – there are many accounts of him being humiliated by the intrusive KGB agents who accompanied him on tours abroad – yet his image remained firmly that of a sturdy, surly Homo sovieticus. The better he played, the more he seemed to be taken for granted, especially in his home country.

While Gilels’s place among the pianistic greats has never been in doubt, no other member of that select cohort was as bereft of charisma as this short, retiring man: not for him the diabolical magnetism of a Horowitz, Michelangeli or Richter. (The latter, in particular, was often contrasted to Gilels as an iconoclastic, anti-establishment figure; though how much this holds water after the Khrushchev thaw is questionable. If anything, Richter, whose father was executed by the regime in 1941, was the ideal man to form a new consensus at a time when Kremlin sought to turn the page after Stalin.)

And what of his legacy today? Most record guides cite his Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Beethoven sonata cycle on Deutsche Grammophon – left incomplete at the time of his death – among the reference recordings for the repertoire; yet for many fans his refinement and humanity truly shine through in the miniature. A sense of time and phrasing that invite comparisons to the greatest of singers are the hallmarks of his celebrated selection from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces as well as his Chopin. His interpretations of the French impressionists are not the most idiomatic, yet Debussy’s Pour le piano in his hands becomes a scintillating exploration into the possibilities of piano sound. His dramatic, Beethovenian Mozart is not to everyone’s taste but had its admirers, such as Karajan and Argerich.

It is unclear whether there is any truth to the rumour that Gilels died in 1985 as a result of a botched injection at the exclusive yet substandard Kremlin hospital, yet as an allegory it’s a tempting one. If there’s a meaning to be assigned to his biography, being put away by the bungling of a regime of which he was an increasingly unwilling servant is a chilling yet fitting epitaph. As to assigning meanings to his art, this is something for each of us to do on her or his own. God knows it had suffered enough.

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